Aliou Ly’s Women of the Portuguese Guinea Liberation War joins the scholarship that has challenged the erasure and minimization of women in war and conflict. Ly’s work performs a historiographical intervention that uses oral testimonies secured through intentional interview questions, archival fragments, and critical reflections, to contest the silencing of women within the liberation struggle in Guinea Bissau. By taking on this work, Ly contributes to the growing corpus of African feminist historical recovery.
Through six chapters, Ly examines colonial policies and their impact on female work and women’s participation in the armed struggle. He also looks at war narratives and how war was gendered through heroization of fighters, as well as the aftermath of the war on gender roles and equality. In so doing, Ly invites deeper theoretical questioning about memory and the politics of narrative silence, agency, gendered roles, postindependence betrayals, gendered forgettings, and narrative form.
Ly challenges the colonial obscuring and transmutation of roles and gender through comprehensive historical analysis and centers women’s own role in such obscuring. Thus, he offers a theoretical apparatus for understanding that historical silence is not merely imposed through hierarchies but is internalized, performed, and reified by the subjects themselves. The book goes further by making substantiated claims about why women’s narratives are excluded, what such exclusion means in the bigger picture of a struggle, and what results from that exclusion. In a brilliant narrative, Ly raises the prominence of women’s roles as a counternarrative to the self-paradox discourses, challenging a pattern where women’s roles and responsibilities during war are normalized and, in that process, relegated to secondary roles while elevating the role and tasks that men took charge of. To challenge the self-paradox patterns, Ly ascribes equal importance to women’s roles by arguing that “it was in fact, revolutionary to cook, fetch, and do laundry in military or guerrilla base settings, rather than in households, because military or guerilla bases had always been considered exclusively male environments” (71). What was more profound was the way women asserted the essence and centrality of the domestic roles they played. According to Ly, a former combatant retorted: “do you think the men could win the fight without us women fighting with them? No, because empty stomachs will not help in combat operations” (90).
Ly’s insight on how conflict reorganizes gendered roles bears resonance with my own ethnographic encounters in conflict-ridden Kaduna, Nigeria. In those circumstances, women did not simply step into male-designated spaces of protection, they reconstituted those roles on their own terms—shaped by necessity, pain, and community expectations. In my work, I called this framework “circumstance-cial construction.” Ly’s interlocutors exemplified such circumstance-cial agency (Asubiaro Dada, Mai Kariya (Female Protectors): The Evolving Role of Women in Conflict in Kaduna State, Nigeria, University of Toronto, 2025). Women took up arms, evacuated wounded comrades, or spied on colonial troops not for ideology, but for survival, solidarity, or duty. Gender roles were not only transgressed—they were tactically reinvented.
Beyond theorizing women’s self-paradox, the book’s analysis of postindependence statecraft and its gendered impact is powerful and reveals disheartening outcomes. Ly recounts how female combatants were sidelined, denied pensions, and stripped of recognition. The postcolonial state did not consider women’s emancipation as part of its broader struggle for liberation, thus resulting in their betrayal—a condition that A.M. Tripp, Women and Power in Post Conflict Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2015) has argued is not unique to Guinea Bissau. These testimonies mirror accounts documented in postconflict states that experienced nationalist masculinities across Africa, highlighting the fragility of feminist gains in revolutionary movements. Ly’s book makes a strong contribution to the argument that women’s erasure from these narratives is not accidental but structural.
However, the transnational dimensions of the liberation struggle, and the roles of Cuba and the Soviet Union, which was briefly mentioned, could have been expanded. By comparing Guinea Bissau’s history to Mozambique’s, Ly could have provided a more extensive cartography of memory across Lusophone Africa.
Historical accounts are often written in a linear fashion, which is why Ly moves through the eras to show the gradual exclusions of women. However, this discursive style contributes to some of the inconsistencies and repetitions in the book’s historical accounts. For instance, on page 38 Ly reports that women were not allowed to participate in direct military combat during the revolution, but on the next page (39), Ly reports that women participated in the military until 1972. Organizing the book’s historical accounts along thematic lines might have served better.
Without doubt, Women of the Portuguese Guinea Liberation War is a theoretically important work that scholars of war, conflict, revolution, and gender will find compelling. It chips away at the patriarchal monolith of nationalist history, offering a more textured, feminist cartography of struggle. It affirms that the telling of women’s stories is not a footnote to liberation but a central battleground for it. For African feminists, students of conflict studies and scholars of history and especially those of us engaged in transitional justice, oral history, or survivor-centered advocacy, Ly offers both inspiration and provocation.
